There’s something absolutely ludicrous about ghost-hunting TV. Adults with their kit wander around derelict buildings, claim to have picked up a presence, and then spend the next 40 minutes screaming down empty corridors. It’s the sort of thing that would make the perfect horror story, and Craig DiLouie is very much aware of that. In Episode Thirteen, he takes the very familiar premise and attempts to make it genuinely creepy.

The story is about Matt and Claire Kirklin (a married couple) who run Fade to Black, a paranormal investigation programme. Their latest expedition takes them to the Paranormal Research Foundation, a run-down mansion with a dark history of strange 1970s experiments. For Matt, it’s the perfect opportunity to prove that there is life after death. Unfortunately for all concerned, the house won’t be short on oddities and has a conveniently located cold spot.

DiLouie’s biggest strength is the format he’s chosen. Instead of telling the story in the usual narrative way, the book constructs it from recordings, transcripts, journals, letters, and all manner of other fragments. It feels like a documentary assembled after the fact; you gradually piece the puzzle together. It’s a very effective method, and one that works extremely well for anyone who’s ever watched a found-footage film and had the nagging feeling that something awful was just out of the camera’s view.

It also creates a nice tension between scientific scepticism and the possibility of the supernatural. The characters arrive with their technology and professional credentials, believing that with enough evidence, they can explain everything. The more they dig into the house’s history, the less confident they become in their methods. DiLouie realises that horror is often most potent when the rational explanation is just within reach, then slips away at the very end.

The docu-style approach is a double-edged sword. It creates a real atmosphere and lets a number of different viewpoints come through, but it can also feel very fragmented. Transcripts and recorded observations are useful devices, but at times they distance you from the emotional experience. Sometimes I really wanted to be frightened with the characters rather than just read another description of someone being frightened.

The pace is another thing. It takes a while to establish the crew, their relationships, and the location’s history. That groundwork is necessary, but at times the build-up feels more sluggish than tense. Once the horror really kicks in, though, the book gets much more gripping, and the slower bits feel even more tedious.

Still, DiLouie gets credit for not settling for a standard haunted-house yarn. It slowly moves beyond the usual trappings of ghostly sightings and unexplained sounds to examine ideas that give the supernatural element a far more substantial, ambitious flavour. A few developments are genuinely disturbing, and the central mystery keeps you turning the pages.

Ultimately it’s a pretty good example of modern horror and really does take advantage of the central conceit. It’s very much in the spirit of the paranormal investigation genre and finds several genuinely effective ways to make you uncomfortable. The only downside is its disjointed structure and, at times, lethargic pace, which keeps it from quite living up to the potential of its premise.

I thought it was a great experience, especially when the story let its carefully constructed evidence give way to outright terror. I’d have liked it to be a bit more frightening, less repetitive, and more confident in its use of darkness.

In the end, Episode Thirteen is a genuinely creepy, imaginative haunted-house mystery, executed in a clever found-footage format. It’s just a bit lost in the paperwork at times.

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